You knew it was coming.
You've probably heard it a dozen times today already. Still, it somehow seems profane not to end the day with Imagine.
If you love rock and roll, as I do, you love John Lennon, too. Even beyond the music, he was one of the best people of the last century. And more than any other song, this one explains what he was about.
Two versions—live and acoustic on top, then the famous video, below.
Someone did a very nice job of adding pictures to this beautiful acoustic version of John's Watching the Wheels. This is among my favorite of his songs, recorded during the last year of his life, and showing what a happy place he'd finally come to.
I cried a little hearing it, just as I did when I heard it after his murder. He'd come such a long way, across his own ocean, to his own green lawn, and it seemed that John, indeed, held the green light in his hands. Always seemed so unfair, you know? But maybe it's best to go out that way, at the happiest possible time. Like his joy is preserved forever in the amber-like moment we remember him in, the last time we saw him living, the last association we have with him sharing the earth with us—maybe part of John lives in that, deathless, as Wallace Stevens' Susanna. "Momentary in the mind" he lives "on the clear viol of (our) memory"—
"And makes a constant sacrament of praise."
Yeah, I know...
Nice thought, though.
John Lennon would be seventy today.
Yeah, that's hard to imagine, huh? Lennon's one of the very, very few examples in modern culture where talent and hype do not co-exist disproportionately.
Top, a nice group of images someone assembled to complement one of John's best songs, In My Life. Bottom, my favorite of his songs, Strawberry Fields Forever, along with the video made to accompany its release.
